David Ownby, "Guerrilla Translation"

Guerrilla Translation in a Borderless World

David Ownby

December 15, 2020
 
On December 2, the journalist Ian Johnson published a piece on SupChina about my website entitled “What is China Thinking?”  Soon after, he announced the publication on his Facebook page.  To my surprise, this posting was followed by a prolonged critical attack on me and my site by academics who—I think this is a fair depiction—consider themselves to be defenders and purveyors of critical theory, or at least as the guardians of the best interests of the writers I translate. 

The issue?  I do not always get permission from the authors of the texts I translate before posting them on my site.  My critics claimed to be shocked, shocked, I tell you.  How would I feel if someone did that to me?  Do I have no respect for copyright law?  Do I have no ethical standards? Would I do the same thing if I were working on French or German intellectuals (in other words, might I be racist)?  I tried to answer online, but it was immediately clear that this was becoming the kind of pile-on, car-crash event that happens all too often on the Internet, so I said my piece and left.  We are supposed to “relish a good fight,” but this one seemed to be descending into ad hominem vitriol, and I was outnumbered.  Besides, Facebook is not a good place for a cat fight.

To be perfectly honest, I also left the discussion because the question had never occurred to me.  Now that the dust has settled, I feel that while the attack was uncivil and perhaps even in bad faith, the central question is worth thinking about:  Why had I never thought about getting the permission of the author? And now that I have, what do I think?

I will go through my reasoning at some length below, but for someone who wants a quick read, here is where I land:  On the face of it, I should ask permission.  It is the legal and decent thing to do.  At the same time, in the absence of a compelling reason (money, a competing project, evidence that the translator’s intentions are malign), why should an author be able to choose who reads her already published work, because this what telling me “not to translate” comes down to? 

The New Confucian Kang Xiaoguang once wrote a very unflattering book on China (J’accuse:  So the Tragedy of Li Siyi Never Happens Again 起訴 : 為了李思怡的悲劇不再重演), the core incident of which is that the police arrested a young mother, Li Siyi, a drug addict who had left her children in the apartment while she went out to score drugs, and the children subsequently starved to death because no one bothered to check on them.   I once read that Kang refuses to allow this book to be translated out of national pride (or embarrassment, or fear of being accused of besmirching the good name of the motherland).  I understand his feelings (and will not translate his book), but does this make any kind of sense other than emotional?    

In the internet age, when texts move from platform to platform and language to language at the push of a button, how do we choose between an author’s right to control their message and a reader’s right to read what is out there—again when we are talking about “theft” that does not take money out of the author’s pocket (or a publisher’s, more likely)?  I confess that I do not know.  At the same time, I have been doing precisely this kind of guerrilla translation for two and a half years, during which time my web site has received something like a half a million page views, and I have received one request to take down a post (because the author had promised it to a print publication).  I took it down immediately.  To me this is prima facie evidence that whatever harm I am doing is minimal, whatever the moral or legal arguments involved.   “The harm you know about,” my critics will immediately retort.  Okay, but at a certain point this gets to be like Republican claims of voter fraud.  Sure, it could happen, but it does not seem to happen often.
 
Now for the longer version.

Why did the question of the author’s permission not occur to me?  Probably because, over the years I have been engaged in this and similar projects, the only people worried about permissions have been editors at publishing houses. Chinese authors obviously know what copyright is but they also understand their commercial interests. And because none were at stake, when we needed to secure permission for a print publication, they signed the appropriate forms. Otherwise, I cannot recall the issue being raised a single time, formally or informally, outside of the specific context of dealing with the legal teams of publishing houses.  Prior to the pandemic, I did a fair bit of purposeful hanging around with Chinese intellectuals, all of whom knew what I do.  No one ever brought it up. 

In addition, my project started out small, in the sense that it was really just an idea that stuck in my head and not part of any larger institutional initiative or intellectual agenda (it grew out of a successful grant application).  I paid a graduate student to build a web site, learned to manage it, and jumped in.  The idea of sending out a message saying “Dear famous Chinese intellectual, I would like to translate your essay and post it on my obscure web site that no one has ever heard of” would have struck me as a pretentious and silly waste of time, both theirs and mine.

Furthermore, my project is grounded in a deep, genuine respect for the authors whose work I translate, which I think that any one who has spent time on my site understands.  I am not a troll (nor a guerrilla, if truth be told).  I choose texts I think are interesting and translate them in their entirety, doing my best to put them in the context in which they were written and to give them their due.  I treat the authors as equals, as well, which means I occasionally allow myself the same snarky comments I would make to or about colleagues anywhere.  I have no political agenda of which I am aware, and purposefully translate texts from the left, right, and center of the Chinese establishment intellectual thought world, sometimes basing these choices on the advice of my Chinese colleagues.  Sure, I have opinions, but this is not an advocacy project.  Over the course of our lives, we have all met people who are really into rocks or trees (“Have you seen this root structure? Simply amazing!”).  I am driven by the same kind of curiosity and desire to share something I find fascinating (I can hear my critics now:  “I knew it!  Ownby compares the Chinese to rocks and trees!”  Please).  Would you object to someone translating and promoting your work without your permission because they sincerely think you are fascinating?  I certainly would not.

None of this of course justifies not asking permission; these are post facto guesses as to why the idea did not occur to me.

To my constant surprise, over the course of two and a half years, the web site has become…a thing.  In this calendar year, it will have had something like 80,000 individual visits and 250,000 page hits.  On an average day, 220 people visit the site.  The newsletter has some 1,500 subscribers (of whom only 50% open the email I send out, and less than half of that 50% actually clicks on a link, so servers are not crashing).  Given the impact I appear to be having, I agree that it would be wise to revisit for a moment what it is that I am doing and whether I am doing it “right.”

On reflection, what I am doing is using my skills and knowledge to provide a public service.  That service consists of sharing my fascination with the world of Chinese establishment intellectuals between roughly 2000 and the present.  I really had no idea what public I might serve at the beginning or how I might ultimately serve it.  It turns out that in addition to fellow scholars and China-watchers, my subscribers include investment bankers, public intellectuals, writers, journalists, diplomats and government officials, one former world leader (who will remain nameless)—in short, a broad range of people who think that understanding the world of Chinese thought is important to humanity’s present and future.  This has confirmed my initial impulse, which was to engage in what might be called applied scholarship; I see myself as a curator of translations (most of which I do myself) drawn from the world of contemporary Chinese establishment intellectuals.  So my goal is to locate and translate interesting texts, tell my readers why I think they are interesting, and then let them use those texts for their own purposes.  My site is a facilitator, and I am delighted when I see an op-ed or an article in a major newspaper constructed principally out of texts I have made available.  This is why the introductions I write do not attempt to be scholarly; I am not writing solely for scholars.

In the internet age, it is obvious that I will do my curating online.  The work of translation is devalued by university presses and tenure committees and is thus a poor career strategy for academics, unless they have tenure or are unconcerned about promotion.  In addition, since university presses in general do not value translations, those that are translated often wind up on minor presses, printed in limited press runs, and thus relatively unavailable, a disadvantage to those who might want to use them.  By contrast, a website is available (almost) everywhere, and has (almost) infinite capacity.  I currently add roughly five texts a month to the site, so if I continue for another ten years, there will be another 600 texts, all readily available in the same place.  Academic publishing takes forever; I can get “from farm to table” in a week or two.  Thus there are clear advantages to posting online, particularly for projects like mine. 

What is lost when I post rather than publish? First, I readily admit that there are legal and perhaps ethical issues that I have not tried very hard to work through.  I don’t know what a lawyer would tell me about the legality of translating an online Chinese text and posting it on a Canadian website (the platform for which is American).  My first thought is that what copyright protects is above all commercial interests, and since there is no money involved in what I do, then this is much ado about not very much.

Peer review—which is also part of traditional publishing—is not, of course about commercial interests, but about academic quality and integrity.  Peer review is essential to academic and intellectual life; it is all that separates us from fake news.  That said, I have published any number of translations over the course of my career on academic presses, and in my experience, peer review adds little to academic quality and integrity to these kinds of translations, for two reasons.  First, unless you are retranslating a classic or adding to an important body of already translated work, very few people are qualified to comment on the value of the selections you have chosen to translate.  If you are offering a new translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, experts can weigh in.  This is less true for translations of the work of contemporary establishment Chinese intellectuals.  And in any event, peers intervene only when the manuscript is already put together, at which point suggesting changes in the choice of texts is radical. 

As for peer review of the quality of the translation, this simply does not happen, in my experience.  At best, some readers will spot check a paragraph here and there, but taking the time to really proofread a translation from the Chinese is simply out of the question.    

I might add that in recent volumes of translations that we have published in book form, we obtained permission simply by hunting down the emails of the authors and asking them—at the penultimate minute of the publication process—if they agreed.  All said yes without asking further questions.  No one asked the Chinese authors if they actually possessed those rights or queried the Chinese publications in which the texts originally appeared.  In effect, this sort of due diligence is checking a box because your lawyer told you to, and has little or nothing to do with genuine respect for the authors and their intentions.

In sum, if you want to publish your translations as a book, this is what you have to do because these are a the legal requirements of a publishing house.  But the entire process is make-work and formalistic and adds little or nothing to the quality of what you have done.  Young scholars need to go through this process to prove their bona fides.  Senior scholars can make other choices.  The only thing I miss about university presses is the copy editing.  I have little patience for proof reading and it shows (sorry).  But overall, the only thing that guarantees the quality of the translation and the respect for the author’s intention is the translator’s ability and integrity.

“But what if you get it wrong?” my critics insist.  The only complaint I have received came from Qin Hui, who once wrote, telling me that I had missed a joke in my translation of his “Dilemmas of 21st-Century Globalization:  Reasons and Solutions with a Critique of Piketty’s Twenty-First Century Capitalism,” a sprawling text if there ever was one, 18,000 words/70 pages long.  If all I missed was a joke (which I promptly fixed), I can sleep soundly. 

Jokes aside, there are surely other errors in my translations.  I hope they are minor, but my overarching principle is that if I have no idea what an author is talking about, or if the text is from a field so distant that I would not understand it in any language, I do not translate it.  Admittedly, I work fast and I translate freely (in other words, I do not translate literally but to convey what I, to the best of my ability, believe to be the author's meaning).  At no point have I said that my translations are “definitive.”  I have been doing this for awhile and people tell me that I’m good at it, so I stand by what I have done. But when someone eventually produces, say, the definitive study of Jiang Shigong’s work in the 2010s and fine-tunes (or corrects) my translations, I will be happy to add the links to that work to my site.

Even so, let’s imagine the worst: I mess up.  What happens?  The author (or a reader) could write me and I would fix it.  I am not hard to find and I am happy to fix my translations.  If only there were someone at my website who spoke Chinese, the authors could even write me directly...

So why the furor? Let me venture a guess. One critic seemed particularly concerned that I would “misconstrue the author’s intent,” which I had a hard time understanding at first, but ultimately led to what I think might be the proximate cause for my critics’ concerns (because it seems to me unlikely that a widespread malaise about Ownby’s unauthorized translations is really keeping people up at night). 

Over the course of this last spring, as the pandemic spread around the world, I decided to seek out and translate Chinese intellectual commentary on the virus and its effects, believing that the conjuncture of China’s rise with the pandemic would produce valuable reflections in China’s thought world.  In late April, I ran across a text by Wang Hui (“The Revolutionary Personality and the Philosophy of Victory:  Commemorating Lenin’s 150th Birthday”) which was published in a special issue of Beijing Cultural Review devoted to the coronavirus.  Wang Hui is a big deal, surely China’s best-known establishment New Left intellectual.  The title of the piece seemed to have nothing to do with the coronavirus, but the editors’ introduction to Wang’s piece made various links between Lenin, revolution, and the pandemic, and Wang himself made similar noises in the first paragraph or two, so I thought I had a “scoop” and got to work. 

It turns out that Wang’s text had almost nothing to do with the coronavirus; the Beijing Cultural Review had added Wang to their roster for the same reason I decided to translate him—he is famous—and I fell for it.  A few weeks later, however, the independent scholar and Liberal thinker Rong Jian posted an online criticism of Wang Hui’s piece, entitled “What Does the ‘Philosophy of Victory’ of the Revolutionary Mean?  Criticizing Wang Hui’s ‘Revolutionary Personality’ and ‘Philosophy of Victory.’”Rong’s piece was almost immediately removed from the Internet by China’s censors, but the author altered the text slightly and reposted it on different URLs, and the piece was ultimately seen by hundreds of thousands of readers. 

 A few days later, Rong Jian posted a follow-up critique, entitled “Wang Hui’s ‘Heidegger Moment?’”  This second text repeats many of the criticisms of the first—which basically takes Wang to task for intellectual laziness—but also makes explicit a charge at which he had only hinted in the earlier article:  that Wang (like other members of China’s New Left) have embraced China’s current regime (and China’s supreme leader) in ways that recall the German philosopher’s controversial engagement with Hitler and Nazism, a charge that is flattering neither to Wang nor…to China’s supreme leader.  The Wang-Rong “debate” was thus an event in China’s intellectual world. 

Making lemonade out of lemons, I translated all three texts, giving the flavor of the exchange, which, while complicated, comes down to something like Wang Hui’s saying, “Bro, wasn’t Lenin great?” and Rong Jian’s answering, “Dude, didn’t Stalin suck?”  (You can read the Taiwanese writer and translator Brian Hioe's take on the debate here).

A few days after posting the texts to my site, I received an email from a graduate student, informing me that Wang’s piece was part of a collective volume being put together on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Lenin’s birth and that he, the grad student, was the translator for Wang’s piece.  He seemed slightly miffed, which I can understand.  I am not so old that I cannot remember a time when being asked to translate a major author would have seemed like a feather in my cap, and here I was taking his feather (sort of).  I asked him for details about the publication, promising to amend the site and include the details about his translation and the volume, but he never got back to me.

There is a considerable overlap between those who purvey and defend critical theory in China Studies and admirers of Wang Hui, and I suspect the idea that I might “misconstrue an author’s intention” in fact refers to this incident.  It is true that I did not convey Wang’s intention to publish a translated version of his text in a volume of similar essays, but this fact was mentioned nowhere in the original online publication (I rechecked), so Wang did not convey this intention to his Chinese readers either.  The debate that Wang’s piece sparked had nothing to do with where he would eventually publish his essay.  It is also true that had I contacted Wang Hui at the outset, then he might have told me that the piece was already destined for translation elsewhere, and I probably would have dropped the idea, thus eliminating whatever kerfuffle my translation ultimately caused for the graduate student and his project.  But then we would not have had the translation of the debate, which is at least as important a context as the English-language volume in which Wang’s piece finally appeared.

Let’s imagine a scenario where I discover Wang’s text because of Rong Jian’s criticism, contact Wang to ask his permission, and Wang refuses both because the text is already being translated and because Rong has made him look bad.  A thoroughly understandable reaction.  I don’t know what kind of introduction accompanies Wang’s text in the volume on Lenin, but I am sure that it is more flattering than how he appears on my website (where he is raked over the coals by Rong Jian).  For me, the question is:  should it be up to Wang to decide?  I don’t think so.  To my mind, both of these postures—i.e., that of Wang as international commentator on Lenin and that of Wang as the object of criticism in China—are important in the sense that Wang’s eventual biographer will want to know about them both.  Nor do I think that having Wang’s text on my site will affect the sales of the published volume.

​Of course, I could start asking permission now, but given the pace at which I work, my worry is that it would turn into some version of trying to get teenagers to clean their room.  You ask nicely, you wait, you nag, and then eventually you do it yourself when they are at school just to be done with it.  Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, who got a good deal done over the course of her life, once said:  “If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It is much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.”